Page 1584 - Week 06 - Thursday, 3 May 1990
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Assembly I take this opportunity to draw to the Government's attention the appropriateness in this Territory of adopting a legislative device - which the Commonwealth is now adopting and which, I understand, is being adopted in some other States of Australia - of imposing monetary penalties by way of penalty units which apply throughout the legislation of that particular jurisdiction. One Act makes provision for periodic amendment of the monetary level of the penalty in the penalty units.
The task of so reforming the law in the ACT would require a once and for all examination of monetary penalty provisions in the range of ACT legislation. That is a process that could perhaps be brought to the attention of this Assembly's Committee on Legal Affairs. That may be a subject to be looked into by that committee. Once you have done that, once you have been through all these monetary penalties and you get the relativities right, you do not then have to be coming back constantly and upgrading the penalty units.
It is a problem in both the State and Federal parliaments that a particular item of legislation may be topical and so it is upgraded but another piece of legislation may be left at the bottom of the statute book and not looked at for years, and the penalty, when you come to examine it, turns out to be quite inappropriate. This legislative device in imposing penalty units would bring the ACT into line with the most modern jurisdiction in Australia in this area. Over the long term it would save this Assembly much fairly trivial work in regularly re-examining penalty units. I commend the amendments to the house.
MR DEPUTY SPEAKER: Mr Connolly, the other point you raised might be something our Legal Affairs Committee might like to take on board.
MR COLLAERY (Attorney-General) (11.37): I did not intend to respond to this. I should indicate to the Assembly that the amendments we are agreeing to will create some anomalies. I will be obliged to bring forward an appropriate supplementary amending Bill because in some instances, through amending these penalty arrangements, we are going to have a higher penalty for a subsidiary offence than for a major one in the main body of the Act. I think this should be on the record in case the point is taken publicly. We will move to bring in a supplementary amendment Bill to bring it up to date. For example, the Act provides for a penalty of $40. What we are doing is providing for a higher penalty for a carrying-on offence.
The question of doing our penalty reviews on the run arises in this morning's debate. I think we are committed now to these amendments. We will allow them through and we will have to bring in fairly quickly some additional supplementary amendments to overcome the anomalies we are going to produce at this stage. I do not know whether we
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